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Smothered by Kittens?

July 5, 2015

The US Supreme Court rules 5-4 against death-row inmates who didn’t want to be executed with a toxin that causes excrutiating pain. The reason given by one justice: they failed to offer a better method of killing them. Which prompts the question: since when are prisoners responsible for figuring out the best way to execute them?

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Ted Rall is the political cartoonist at ANewDomain.net, editor-in-chief of SkewedNews.net, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is the author of the biography "Trump," to be published in July 2016.

25 thoughts on “Smothered by Kittens?”

I dunno – the number of false convictions is very troubling. I was recently reading about someone who had served several years of on a rape charge, he’d even confessed – yet years later he was exonerated by DNA evidence.

But the flip side is, “What do we owe scumbags like Gary Ridgeway and George Bush?” do we really owe them room & board & medical care for the rest of their lives?

The purpose of punishment is to chance someone’s behavior, but if they’re serving a life sentence they’re not getting out anyway.

Carbon monoxide poisoning is quite painless and remarkably effective. How can I say that? People who have survived carbon monoxide poisoning say the same thing over and over. “I just suddenly felt sleepy.” They never say anything about anguish or agony or anything like that. They just drift off and, with the exception of a few very lucky people who are yanked out in time, don’t come back.

Other equally relaxing ways? Hell. Come on. There’s plenty of ways to painlessly put someone to death. Sedatives, by definition. Anesthetic gas. Ever been on nitrous oxide? You can have all the teeth in your head pulled out on that and be laughing the whole time.

The obvious question now becomes this: If serving up the “death” part of the penalty is so simple, why is there such a production about the method for doing it? Why is the best we can come up with a triple-drug cocktail? This is like something out of James Bond.

So let’s address that. Why does everyone go around acting like it’s tremendously complex to cause a painless death?

Thoughout history, people who are deemed execution-worthy should “feel-the-pain” at least as much as their (alleged) victim(s) (maybe) did … of course, leaving the questioned begged about those many “false-positive” perps who had wrongfully been found guilty and then murdered by the state.

Meanwhile, you’ve offered the perfect method of execution alex, if it were pain they were actually attempting to avoid.
Nitrous oxide will — and has — killed the clueless quite painlessly. Chloroform is also another “knock-out” gas that could effectively be used. It seems that the best way is to use two different gasses the first being NO or CF for about 5 minutes, and then finishing it off with around 10 minutes of CO. But that is wholly contrary to the most secret agenda of authoritarian tyranny.

And also, there is a REAL BIG problem … nobody on the inside loop of law enforcement (the politicians will always get their 15 ounces of flesh) would be making any obscene kind of money providing exotic chemicals for the dead-meat slaughter of convicted prisoners. I mean, where’s the fun in letting the convicted just slip into a wholly painless non-existence?

Doncha get it? WE ARE a Biblically captured culture. EXECUTION is supposed to look AND be painful, GOD DEMANDS IT! Especially for the questionably guilty. This is a patented element of the State-Execution-Infrastructure. The most deeply embedded government sadists really do get off on it.

Because gas chambers are associated with the Nazis, and strange contraptions strapped to people’s faces are associated with Hollywood horror movies. Probably. And the current paradigm is to try to make execution look like a medical procedure, preferably a mysterious one that may or may not be painful, in order to satisfy both the make-it-humane and the make-them-suffer constituencies.

I recommend that all death-row inmates, faced with the decision of SCOTUS that they should “present a better method,” ask for death by carbon monoxide poisoning. I haven’t been there, but I’ve read that it is quite painless and very effective: just go to sleep and never wake up. (?)

Well, falco, death, being universal, is hardly unusual, nor do I think it always cruel. But administering it to another person who does not wish to die is certainly cruel ; let us hope it also becomes unusual….

I was referring, in frustration and derision, to the all-to-usual, cruelly illogical approach of the Five Horses’ Asses of the SCOTUS. (Can you imagine the outrage “from the bench” if the low-life convicts HAD suggested alternate methods for their own executions?)

As to the underlying issue, assuming conviction of the correct person, I think the terminal boredom (mixed with the periodic horror) of life in prison is much better punishment than deliverance to oblivion. I understand it’s cheaper for the tax payer, too.

What I’d really like to see abolished immediately is the single-moment arrest, trial, sentencing and execution of unarmed persons in the streets of the US by “law” enforcement. Heck I’d settle for ONE indictment.

Agree with your final paragraph, falco, although I submit that ONE indictment (and conviction and punishment) would not be enough to stop that plague. Charles Lutwidge Dodgeson characterised it as follows in his most famous work :

«’I’ll be
judge,
I’ll be
jury,’
Said
cunning
old Fury;
‘I’ll try
the whole
cause,
and
condemn
you
to
death.’»

Re: “one indictment”: I would hope you could bear with my stylistic choices (e.g. here, a bit of understatement) because at some point I will be dishing out a can of whoop-ass zeugma embellished with a tad of epizeuxis.
tinyurl.com/or67d3h

at mhenriday – Gosh, calm down. All I’ve tried to say is that the issue is beyond ridiculous. I am not espousing capital punishment or legalized murder. The issue, if you can calm down and stop barking for a moment, is the stupidity of the idea that they willl keep using a horrible method of execution because they can’t find another. Dude, are you sick or somethng? Calm down and stop trolling so hard to attack another person. It sounds like you are full of hate. It might be a good idea for you to take your hate elsewhere.

No, «rikster», the «barking» has been entirely on your side – recommending duct-taping «a stick of dynamite» to someone’s head and then detonating it , as you did on the last-but-one thread – and then to claim that «[you are] not espousing capital punishment or legalized murder» – is indeed «barking» – by a rabid dog. That someone like yourself would attempt to play the monitor on these threads and determine who gets to post and who not is simply ludicrous, but as I noted above, hardly surprising….

Let’s go IsRallites! Ted’s making fun if how ridiculous the decision is to continue horrible execution practices because they ain’t got any other approved killing methods.
What’s your take on it? Like the song “The Israelites” says, “I don’t want to go like Bonnie and Clyde” – I say, Why Not? A few hundred bullets at one time might be a bit quicker than twitching and writhing in pain from the incompetent administration of inefficient drugs.
I’m at a loss here – why not duct-tape a stick of dynamite or a grenade to their head?

Dumb and dumber – that’s how this issue is being handled. Bureaucracy at its worst. Watching the states trying to finger out a way to kill someone is like watching a dog chase its tail. If they have to do it, fast and efficient is what it should be, and there are obviously thousands of ways it can be done, just ask a police officer, soldier or even Dick Cheney.

«If they have to do it, fast and efficient is what it should be, and there are obviously thousands of ways it can be done, just ask a police officer, soldier or even Dick Cheney.» You mean waterboarding the condemned to death, «rikster» ? Let’s not forget the element of pure sadism in these executions, which perhaps plays a more important role than demands for speed and efficiency.. Besides, «[i]f they have to do it», is begging the question – «they» – i e, the authorities, don’t «have to do it» ; legalised murder by the state is always a matter of choice, at one level or another….

Oh, for God’s sake mhenriday, get a grip on your fingers and stop typing while your brain is in neutral and you are drinking. All I was trying to say is that this issue is beyond idiotic.
Nothing more. If you want to bark like a crazy dog and troll out, fine, Just remember that your barking and accusations are not considered intelligent here on Ted’s webpage.

Congratulations, «rikster»you have just confirmed that you indeed are the stupid ill-mannered fool your posts to these threads indicated you to be from the very beginning. Pitiful, but hardly surprising…. 😉

“Just remember that your barking and accusations are not considered intelligent here on Ted’s webpage.”
****
I beg to differ.

In my humble opinion, *mhenriday* has contributed astute and beneficial comments far above the average member who posts (in other words, “intelligent”). I, for one, do not consider them “barking” or “trolling” but quite the contrary.

On the other hand, some of *your* posts — oh, never mind. It appears to be an exercise in futility.

The crazy statists would likely construe that option as an unjust reward because of the pleasurable passing, devoid of the painful elements of torture.

The real desire to inflict pain would be obvious in their rejection, on that basis, of the heroin option.

Death is likely only a secondary desire, and having a doctor present to revive a tortured person back to consciousness is likely more to their taste, somewhat like in the primitive madness of interrogation.

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